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Whatsie (beta) is a simple desktop client for WhatsApp Web, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

WhatsApp Messenger is a popular (with more than one billion users) proprietary instant messaging client for smartphones.

A while back, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Web, a web client that can be used through a web browser by synchronizing the mobile device connection. Whatsie uses WhatsApp Web, and it requires having WhatsApp Messenger installed and configured on your mobile device.

Whatsie features native desktop notifications, themes (besides the default theme, the current version ships with 7 extra themes), spell checker and keyboard shortcuts.

There are some optional features as well, like starting Whatsie on login (with an option to start hidden), the ability to close the application to the tray / AppIndicator or to open links in your default web browser.

Here are a few screenshots with some of the features I mentioned above:

Besides being able to close the app to tray, the tray / AppIndicator icon is also used to notify the user about unread messages:

The application supports automatic but that's not supported in Linux if you install it from a package (deb or rpm). However, you can install Whatsie in Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and derivatives from a repository, which provides updates via Software Updater. A Fedora repository is also available.

One feature that would make sense in Whatsie would be to display the number of unread messages as a badge on its Unity Launcher icon (feature that's also supported by Plank and Cairo Dock, among others), but that's not implemented right now.

Such a feature would also mean Unity users wouldn't need to use the Whatsie tray/AppIndicator.

If you can help the developer implement this, see the Whatsie GitHub page.

Note that my instructions above are a bit different than the ones provided on the Whatsie GitHub page - most importantly, I modified the command to add the Whatsie repository to use a separate .list file under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ instead of using /etc/apt/sources.list.